Kathmandu, December 1: The Nepal Stock Exchange last week (Dec 24 to 29) lost 7.83 points to close at 1,112.79 points with the possibility of the banks raising their interest rate on loan any time soon.
On Sunday, the secondary market that opened at 1,120.62 points went down by 10.53 points. It plunged on the two successive trading days i.e Monday and Tuesday before inclining up by 8.29 points on Wednesday. On Thursday, the market again fell by 4.67 points.
“A number of banks have already increased their base rate, indicating that the financial institutions could raise interest rates soon. This affected the investors’ confidence adversely, thus causing a decline in the benchmark index last week,” said a stockbroker on condition of anonymity.
The sensitive index that measures the trading of shares of blue chips companies also went down 0.23 points to close at 246.65 points.
Except microfinance and ‘others,’ all the rest of nine trading groups were the losers during the review period. Non-life insurance was the biggest loser with its sun-indeed going down by 91.29 points to close at 3,970.30 points. Trading and manufacturing also witnessed double-digit each.
Commercial banks, hotels, development banks, hydropower, finance companies, and life insurance were also in the losers’ lists. Of the gainers, microfinance and ‘others’ added 7.16 points and 4.01 points respectively in their indices.
With a fall in share prices of the majority of the sub-groups including the commercial banks, the market capitalization plunged to Rs 1,411.95 billion from Rs1,421.89 billion, making investors lose Rs 9.94 billion in the book value of their investment portfolio.
Last week, NMB Bank Limited witnessed the largest transaction volume of Rs98.59 million. Promoters’ shares of Nepal Investment Bank, Nepal Bank Limited, Himalayan Distillery Limited and Nabil Bank Limited were also among the top five companies with the largest turnovers.
Last week, the transaction amount stood at Rs1.32 billion, which was 16 percent less than the amount of the previous week. The number of traded shares was down to 5,151,230 units from 5,520,820 units.
During the period, Nepal Stock Exchange-listed 15,513,869.367 units of primary shares of Neco Insurance Company, Nepal Insurance Company, Prime Life Insurance Company, Shine Resunga Development Bank and Global IME Laghubitta Bittiya Sanstha.
